30x30 biodiversity gains rely on national coordination
What is 30x30?
Eckert et al., 2023.pdfCanada, along with over 190 other nations, have committed to Target 3 in the new global biodiversity framework (protecting 30% of terrestrial land by 2030), giving humanity a chance to curb biodiversity loss and preserve eroding ecosystem services. 30x30 provides a valuable opportunity to "bend the curve of biodiversity loss" by protecting land important to biodiversity. But how Nation's will choose to prioritize land for protection remains unclear...
How have we prioritized land in the past?
Historically, protected areas were founded to protect landscapes not biodiversity.
In fact, Canada's first protected area (Rocky Mountain now Banff National Park) was founded to help secure the development rights for the government to bolster tourism along the Canadian Pacific Railway.
This historical legacy of ignoring biodiversity when protecting land has led to out current network of protected areas that are inadequate when it comes to safeguarding biodiversity into the future.
Banff National Park, 2021
How can we prioritize biodiversity today?
Bighorn Sheep in Kootenay National Park, 2021
Thanks to the recent explosion of biodiversity data and the development of new models, we have a more detailed understanding of biodiversity today than ever before.
Yet, when it comes to prioritizing biodiversity for protected area planning, questions remain. We know that prioritizing different elements of biodiversity (i.e., taxonomic clades like birds or mammals, species at risk, or different biodiversity facets) can lead to contrasting spatial priorities.
At the same time, we know that the scale at which land is protected (i.e., globally, nationally, or regionally) matters as well.
What we don't know is how these two decisions stack up against one another, and so it is unclear what matters more; what biodiversity we choose to prioritize or how we coordinate protection?
What did we do?
To answer this question we build over 20K species distribution models from publicly available biodiversity data to try and estimate the current distribution of biodiversity in Canada. We then conducted various spatial planning scenarios where we varied either what element of biodiversity is being prioritized or the spatial scale at which the prioritization is conducted to investigate how these decisions impact spatial priorities and biodiversity outcomes. Because Canada is experiencing rapid climate change, we used projected future species distributions to prioritize land that serves species both today and into the future (Fig. 1).
Figure 1 — Workflow of methods including building SDMs, accounting for uncertainty in future projections, designing prioritization scenarios, and evaluating biodiversity outcomes.
What did we find?
Existing protected areas (representing ~15% of terrestrial land) do not capture biodiversity and only protect 15% of all species, including 6% of species at-risk, and only 1% of amphibians and reptiles
A nationally coordinated approach to reaching 30x30 could generate large conservation gains and safeguard over 65% of all species, over 40% of species at-risk, and over 60% of amphibians and reptiles (Fig. 2)
Uncoordinated regional approaches such as protecting 30% of each Province, Territory, or Ecozone, severely limit our ability to protect biodiversity at large
Prioritizing different taxa (i.e., birds, mammals, plants, etc.), species at-risk, or functional or phylogenetic biodiversity facets only slightly affects our ability to realize the potential of 30x30 here in Canada
Figure 2 — Efficiently protecting biodiversity relies on national coordination. A) Spatial priorities across different scales of coordination. Cells are coloured by priority rank and corresponding biodiversity gains are visualized in pie charts. B) Biodiversity trade-offs associated with different scales of coordination across all measures of biodiversity. C-D) The uneven challenge of achieving the baseline National scenario captured by the portion of prioritized land across Provinces, Territories, and Ecozones.
Conclusions
As nations work to fulfill Target 3 of the new Global Biodiversity Framework, their approaches to prioritization land for protection will determine both the success of 30x30 as well as the future of species, communities, and ecosystems around the globe.
We show that a coordinated national strategy can both maximize the protection of a country’s biodiversity, and efficiently contribute to the protection of transnational biodiversity in the broadest sense.
On the other hand, regional representation of protected areas, without national coordination, could severely limit our ability to safeguard biodiversity into the future under climate change. As such, countries should invest in building a national strategy to inform regional and local conservation programs, track progress, and report gains.
Our ability to coordinate and cooperate will likely determine the success of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, and potentially, the future of biodiversity on Earth.
